Machinal… would people today convict a woman for murder if there were sufficient mitigating factors?

Machinal

at the Old Fire Station, Oxford,

on Tuesday, June 17

Review by JON LEWIS

THERE is an intriguing sense of a retrial happening as the audience watches Yasmin Sidhwa’s contemporary version of Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist drama Machinal.

Treadwell based her play on the real-life murderess Ruth Snyder who was sent to the electric chair for killing her husband, having hit him with a bottle filled with small stones. Would people today convict a woman for murder if there were sufficient mitigating factors?

In this Mandala Theatre Young Company production, Sidhwa employs an entertainingly stylised physical approach to scenes, imaginatively choreographed by Lati Saka. Robotic movements suggest that city workers have become unfeeling cogs in the capitalist machine.

Their work lives are fuelled by sexual innuendo and banter in the office. The women are objectified by their male colleagues. In one tense and uncomfortable scene, the main protagonist is groped and sexually assaulted on the train on the way to work. It is seemingly an everyday experience. It is easy to understand that she has an undercurrent of loathing for males.

Characters are depersonalised, reduced in the drama to their initials. The future murderess is a junior in the office. Sidhwa divides her into three separate personas.

This helps to universalise the woman, played by Amber Lewis, Mya Fraser and Indya Pushpangathan, all excellent. She accepts the offer of marriage from her boss. What should be a loving relationship between them becomes one of male dominance. She is forced to submit to his sexual desires.

When the three versions of the husband (Luis Ribiero, Charlie Maline and Zakaria Meknas, also all impressive) take her to bed, they mime a sexual encounter that reeks of sleaze.

It’s when the woman meets a stranger in a night club and begins an affair that she attains some agency in her life.

However, her own mother (Celestine McCauley) cannot even tell if she liked her husband before or after marriage. The refrain that ‘all women get married’ becomes a mantra that sparks the woman’s murderous plot to be free of her husband.

This urgent production moves next to Grenoble, the performers mindful of the recent Gisèle Pelicot abuse case in France.